Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul Page A

and shook her head, as if to telegraph that she was ashamed of her own behavior, and Buck softened, patting her on the back in an unusual show of tenderness. Then he turned to the little girl whom Richard adored. “Did you get his present?” Buck asked.
    “Yes,” she whimpered, “but he wouldn’t let me keep it.”
    At which point Richard, trying to ease her pain, interjected, “That’s okay.” Of course, it wasn’t.
    This unpleasant interlude was just one of many during fourth grade, Richard’s most troubled year at Irving School. He skipped school more often and was suspended for misbehavior on a near-weekly basis. A ritual developed: Richard would act up and get sent home; a family member would drag him by the ear to the principal’s office and ask for him to be reinstated; the principal would comply; Richard would act up again and the cycle would repeat. “You could almost set your watch by it,” recalled his friend Michael Grussemeyer. By the end of that school year, Irving’s administration seems to have given up on him: a note was placed in Richard’s file reading, “S[tudent] can’t return.”
    Richard’s frustrations at school pushed him deeper into the realm of private fantasy at home. He listened to his grandmother’s Doris Day records and confected a Doris Day scenario in his mind, placing himself alongside a cast of beautiful people. He played with Popsicle sticks and imagined they were living characters acting out a Hollywood drama in front of his eyes. “I’d write a lot,” he remembered. “I’d lock myself up in my room for two or three days at a time without eating or sleeping, just writing about life.” He gathered photos of theater marquees from Life magazine and Peoria newspapers, then wrote “RICHIE PRYOR” on a strip of paper and pasted it onto the marquees. Flopped on his bed on the top floor of his grandmother’s brothel, he threw himself into the wildest of fantasies—that he was destined for stardom—even though he had little practical sense of how he might be plucked, like his beloved Little Beaver, out of one life and into another.
    On the bright side, Richard had someone new in his corner at home: a stepmother named Viola Anna Hurst, whom everyone called Ann. Born in New Orleans in 1921, Ann had arrived in Peoria after the war and slipped into work as a prostitute at China Bee’s, the classiest black brothel in town. She was a freckled Creole, so light-skinned she might have passed for white if she had wanted to, and dressed smartly, forties style, in wide-brimmed hats and elegant dresses cinched with belts. Sociable and lively, she charmed her North Washington Street neighbor Buck, who married her on August 16, 1950. For a while Ann assumed some responsibility for taking care of Richard: more often than not, she was the one who pleaded with the principal to let Richard return from suspension during fourth grade. Richard, already familiar with mothers who made their living on the horizontal, took quickly to calling her “Mom.” He liked the look of her and was heartened by the fact that, compared with Marie or Buck, she was no disciplinarian.
    But Ann had her principles, and tried to instill them in Richard. A practicing Catholic, she took Richard to catechism on weekends and helped enroll him in a private Catholic school for fifth grade, since Irving was no longer an option. The school offered the promise of a fresh start, and Richard seemed to welcome that. He made new friends, took school seriously, and impressed his teachers with his intelligence. Halfway into the school year, though, a whispering campaign put an end to his fresh start. Someone complained about how Richard’s family made its living, and the school told Richard he was no longer welcome there.

    Sociable: Richard’s stepmother Ann (second from left) at a Peoria nightclub, circa 1950, with saxophonist Vy Burnside, trumpeter Tiny Davis, and an unidentified friend.
    (Courtesy of Barbara